


something nice about a well-placed elbow to the face

by stephanericher



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-15 17:32:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19300462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: It’s nice to be good at something, but it’s nicer to be better than someone else.





	something nice about a well-placed elbow to the face

**Author's Note:**

> for dw user hibari1_chan
> 
> prompt was 'winning is everything'
> 
> mild gross/violent imagery

Some people act as if winning is everything. That nothing else matters, or at the very least everything bends to the will of the win, that what they do is justified and flawless. You train hard because you want to win; you claim that your way of playing basketball is superior, clearly, because you win, though you may doll it up with words about work ethic or talent or something that appeases people’s ears. In the end, though, all of that goes out the window in defeat. Teammates who claim to cherish bonds bicker and fight and sulk; hard-working players check out of a game they can’t win. It’s all about the victory, and none of it’s about the other team.

Hanamiya cares. Because he’s gentle and kind, and he can’t say that with too much of a straight face or even think it anymore. Putting on that kind of facade for more than a few seconds is tiring, not worth the eventual hurt the feelings of betrayal cause. It’s better to give just enough to make people attached to him as a nice young man, only to yank the rug out from under them, or stick his leg out to stretch and let them trip over it (though, Hara’s pretty good at that--not better than Hanamiya, mind you, but better he risk hurting his leg than Hanamiya). Hanamiya does care about the other team, though. Winning is nice, but on its own it’s nothing. Defeating the other team is independent of the score; if they get the nominal victory when they’ve been ripped apart or are just holding together at the seams, it tastes better than the highest-quality chocolate. 

It’s not strictly formula, like dissecting a grasshopper in biology class, pinning its parts to a sheet and following the directions (or acting like Hara and Yamazaki and ending up with insect guts all over). Every team has its own perfect incision point; every team has its own weakest link. It’s not the reserves, the roster deadweights who give up their time to sit on a bench and cheer loudly every game, hoping for some reward for sticking it out--though their resentment is easy to turn, curdle from the bottom up like an old carton of cream, into a crude weapon of its own, and when a team is out of options and forced to use those players, they’re overexposed by their amateur photographer of a coach, dull legs and lack of in-game experience sucking away whatever small buds of hope are still there. 

The weakest link on the team is the strongest player. Taking them out often leaves a gaping hole, though there are exceptions to that. Rakuzan, the team that had strongly recruited Hanamiya (and how good it had felt to say no, that he wasn’t going to join their silver-medal so-called uncrowned club just so they could play a different kind of second best to a bunch of kids a grade below them). But for most teams, taking out the focal point makes things suddenly messy, dizzy, drunk, until everyone’s fuses blow and it sets off a chain reaction, like a fireworks show for the benefit of Hanamiya.

It doesn’t have to be straight-up violence, though there’s something nice about a well-placed elbow to the face. Any one of them can do it; Hara will lie to the refs and Seto will stare at them on the floor; Yamazaki’s will look something like a basketball play and so will Matsumoto’s; Furuhashi will lie worse than Hara. Hanamiya will relish the sound of the contact, the gasp, the fall, all of it. He will laugh in the fallen player’s teammates faces, watch as the hope falls away from their faces like dead skin, like leaves off a poisoned tree. The score could be anything; the clock could have whatever arbitrary number on it. He could be close to fouling out, but he’ll have squeezed the pulp from the fruit of the team between his fingers before he does. 

It doesn’t have to be that way; violence is overrated when it’s expected. There are other ways to knock a team down. There are words and insinuation; there is playing in their faces and sucking up to the refs. There is passing the ball through the spiderweb of himself and Seto, one point to the next, until the other team feels hopelessly outclassed. You can’t win against a team that’s simply better than you, no matter how many calls and bounces turn your way. Luck won’t buy you a way out of inferiority, and in those cases the score matches up, lopsided like a balloon stretched the wrong way before inflating. But the win is not what matters; it’s the defeat. A victory in a vacuum means nothing when there’s no indication of who lost and how. 

It’s the philosophy that runs through all of their veins, injected into their blood from a young age by word and example. They were the ones who got into the top kindergartens, the top elementary schools, the ones who would inherit carefully-maintained companies, if they were lucky. But the only way to succeed, for their parents, and for them someday, is to defeat the obstacles in your way, hit your competitors hard enough so they can’t recover and the space is yours. It will never stop, but at least for now it’s fun.

There are many ways to drain the life force from other teams (probably some Hanamiya hasn’t gotten to yet, but he’s got another year). The result may be the same, but it always satisfies in a way that sinking long threes and dribbling through traffic can’t on its own. It’s nice to be good at something, but it’s nicer to be better than someone else. It’s nice to dig in your teeth, to write down the perfect lineup to drag a team down, unleash his hellhounds on people who think they’re innocent and pure. Perhaps nice isn’t a strong enough word--but perhaps the words don’t matter so much as their results.


End file.
